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Values and character as the source of what one does is a greater indicator of leadership than simply what one does. If doing nice things for others just for personal gain is not the same things as doing nice things for others because they need it done. Values and character determine the difference.

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This piece seems to shed much light on the misconceptions of many on what it means to lead, and challenges the reader to truly evaluate how they may choose those best to lead with success, virtue, and honesty. It certainly reinforces for me that we currently have a dearth of choices in this election year, and is a bit frightening from that perspective.

Since it appears by the comments that perhaps nobody actually read the article, hereHere are some quotes pulled from it which may encourage you to read more in depth.

"The country wonâ€™t improve, Adams wrote, until the people begin to â€œconsider themselves as the fountain of power.â€

â€ It can be dangerous to decide that you need to be led.

Schools that used to talk about â€œcitizenshipâ€ now claim to train â€œthe leaders of tomorrowâ€; (Rothman in New Yorker)

In a book called â€œThe End of Leadership,â€ from 2012, Barbara Kellerman, a founding director of the Harvard Kennedy Schoolâ€™s Center for Public Leadership, wrote that â€œwe donâ€™t have much better an idea of how to grow good leaders, or of how to stop or at least slow bad leaders, than we did a hundred or even a thousand years ago.â€ She points out that, historically, the â€œtrajectoryâ€ of leadership has been â€œabout the devolution of power,â€ from the king to the voters, say, or the boss to the shareholders.

Khurana points out, deflatingly, that there is little evidence for the â€œC.E.O. effect.â€ The most powerful factor determining a companyâ€™s performance is the condition of the market in which it operates.

â€œbeing a leaderâ€ isnâ€™t an identity but, rather, a set of actions. Itâ€™s not someone you are. Itâ€™s something you do.

Harvard Business School professor, Gautam Mukunda, grew interested in how different organizations fill leadership positions. He noticed that in some organizations the candidate pool is heavily filtered: in the military, for example, everyone who aspires to command must jump through the same set of hoops. In Congress, though, you can vault in as a businessperson, or a veteran, or the scion of a political family. Mukunda hypothesized that, in highly filtered organizations, leaders would end up being relatively interchangeable; in less filtered organizations, individual variation will be greater. By this logic, generals, but not members of Congress, will tend to be more or less equally competent.

As the business books have it, â€œManagers require, leaders inspire.â€) The distinction persists today.

In â€œLeadership BS,â€ a book published last year, Jeffrey Pfeffer, a professor at Stanfordâ€™s Graduate School of Business, identifies five virtues that are almost universally praised by popular leadership writersâ€”modesty, authenticity, truthfulness, trustworthiness, and selflessnessâ€”and argues that most real-world leaders ignore these virtues. (If anything, they tend to be narcissistic, back-stabbing, self-promoting shape-shifters.) To Pfeffer, the leadership industry is Orwellian.

But the virtues that they thought of as leaderlyâ€”courage, decisiveness, sociability, compassion, trustworthiness, integrity, and so onâ€”matter in ordinary life, too. In our rationalized world, there isnâ€™t much space for earnest discussion about virtue; t

.â€ Sometimes, itâ€™s the people supposedly under oneâ€™s control who really call the shots.

because our desire for a coherent vision of the world is bottomless, our hunger for leadership is insatiable, too. Leaders make the world more sensible, but never sensible enough.

A sense of perspective may be among the most critical leadership qualities. For better or worse, however, itâ€™s the one we ask our leaders to hide."

Edited February 24, 2016 by skeptic

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Values and character as the source of what one does is a greater indicator of leadership than simply what one does. If doing nice things for others just for personal gain is not the same things as doing nice things for others because they need it done. Values and character determine the difference.

The problem now a days is that the people who consider themselves leaders THINK they are good leaders. We've evolved as a society as to promote our own agenda at the expense of another's. There's no accountability. Look at the professor in Missouri as a most recent example.

I disagree with the person from the Kennedy School. We know how to grow good leaders. The Tao of Leadership is an excellent tome on the subject. Problem is, egos of leaders get in the way of being good leaders...and the expectation that ANY leaders is somehow without fault tends to taint them.

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One of the reasons we really need to engender real leadership in our charges if we are able. Just look at the disaster of those running for office in our seats of government. It is even getting difficult to choose the lesser of the poor choices, as there seem to be no healthy options, at least to me. Those that might move us in the right direction are apparently so jaded that they prefer to stay out of it and simply work on survival. It is truly alarming to me, and I fear for the immediate future of our country, and the world as well.

The dearth of leadership on these levels is tragic. Obviously, the old saw that "history repeats itself" has not registered. Yet, somehow, I still have some hope, especially when I interview young Eagle candidates or visit with them at a dinner, or read about their non scout peers that seem focussed on bettering their world. Makes me want to push them to take charge now.

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Hmmm I wonder how the people of Rome felt when it was sacked by the northern tribes?

I wonder how the people of Jerusalem felt in 64 AD when Rome finally settled the Jewish issue?

I wonder how the people of Berlin or London felt when the skies filled with bombs?

I wonder how the neighboring communities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki felt back in 1945?

I wonder how many times history will repeat itself once again when it fails to understand what true leadership is all about and follow blindly the egomaniacs that think they are leaders and convince those around them that they are?

I don't know how many do-overs we get..... We had better figure out what leadership is so we can recognize it when we see it. Obviously we haven't been doing so well over the years.

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I don't think it is a coincidence that the "Leadership Industry" resembles Organized Religion. Just as the concept of morality can't be defined as a universal construct (which is why we have organized religion - all with their competing versions of what is and isn't moral, with just enough in common to really make things difficult), the concept of leadership can't be defined as a universal construct, especially when the definition of leadership that we're concerned with essentially states that leadership is the act of leading people. Uh huh.

We can all probably point to examples of "good leadership" and "bad leadership" but the big problem with that is that leadership we might consider to be good in one circumstance we might consider to be bad in another set of circumstances. We needed the leadership style of Jimmy Carter when the Three Mile Island incident occurred. We needed the leadership style of Harry Truman to end WW2. Imagine how different those things would be if Jimmy was President at the end of WW2 and Harry was President during Three Mile Island.

It really makes it difficult to teach Leadership - because how do you teach it? It's really not something you can lecture about - it's not something one is born with (people confuse charisma with leadership - they're just not the same).

My thoughts are that true leadership is a combination of the various styles (I've heard some way there are 30 different kinds of leadership - I suppose that's why I've come up with the comparison to organized religion since there is multiple kinds of religion as well). Can I fully describe it? No - because every time I think I have it, I add or subtract something. I do know that there are a couple of consistent parts that I include. One is inspiration - I think a leader needs to inspire - I see Wendell Berry as an inspirational leader. One is what Stosh likes to remind us - Are you taking care of your people - perhaps that can be servant leadership but at times I can see bombastic leadership styles that also take care of the people.

Or maybe - just maybe, we have to accept that there are multiple styles of leadership and that the right leader will emerge when we need a particular style.